Tag Archives: facebook

OK Go recently released video for their song This Too Shall Pass, of their new album, Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, and it shows that they really understand viral web video and that their target demographic consumes their content on YouTube and Facebook.

First, check out their video, if you haven’t yet. It’s really worth watching, even if you don’t like their music. Analysis after the jump:

As you’ve seen it’s a Rube Goldberg inspired music video that is doing everything it can to keep your attention. It starts with a shock view of singer that looks like he just slaughtered a cow and as that grabs your attentions it gives you an interesting machine to observe as you watch the video. If they kept your attention for 30s you’ve probably managed to be enthusiastic enough about it to instant message it to your friends as well shared it on Facebook etc.

Based on their recent open letter, this is exactly what brings money today to a band – YouTube advertisements and the only way to actually make serious money on YouTube, besides having 500 videos that you released over last 2 years is to go viral with a well thought our video.

This brings to a completely new problem: what sells of the internet is porn, but if you can’t show that, kittens and lolcats will do. So the best tactic for an indie band that would like to get a lot of views would be to get some cute girls and somehow embed fuzzy kittens and puppies into their video. This way you’ll have a few bonus points in terms of views and maybe you’ll be able to achieve tipping point that will allow you to skyrocket the number of your views.

Did you spot any other details in the video that would contribute towards virality and sharing?

Here are some of my notes from the Social Media Club panel discussion that happened tonight:

What is influence?

Influence is a capacity to have some people do something. Actionable influence – influence as a strategy, as a process. You don’t master the outcome but you have a feeling what’s happening and where it’s going to end.

Influence – facilitating conversations between and with customers. You have to be within the context of the conversation.

Brands are today presented in many different worlds and the question is, how to manage all the influence there.

Influence – the art of successfully levering what you can’t control.

You are more influenced by the person that looks like you. What are the ethical and legal ratifications of using such technology?

How do you measure influence? Is the technology really the solution for this problem?

Technique 1: Mapping out all the people that are interesting to us, and then we converse with them (Twitter/Blog/etc.). Then we measure how often they talk about us, and what % of that is positive. After you identify a few thousand people like that, then we measure how many of them we can reach (phone, mail, etc.). Then we measure the reach of their blog and how many people connect through that.

Technique 2 (@Get Satisfaction): Asses the customer satisfaction level: where they are contextually in the conversation (are they angry?) and where they are going.

The role of crowd-sourcing and how does it impact the influence and how does that connect to “Web 2.0”?

Twitter is not very influential, because it’s just another broadcast channel. Until we have threaded @replies, we don’t really have conversations.
Get Satisfaction is a “Social CRM”: There’s a lot of value in deanonymizing your personal data.

If you enable your customers to talk to each other, they’ll get value in that and you’ll get value from eavesdropping. But to get real value out of that, you have to engage in conversation with them.

Twitter is a lot of time used as a broadcast tool, but there are true customers on there and you can reach out to them (not spam them) and engage in deep conversations with them. Too much focus on the tool is dangerous path to go down so you get too focused on the technology.

140 characters – going back to basics, the value of headlines. They’re teaching us to write short and teach us how to be concise.

Does Brand matter anymore?

The brand matters, but it’s changed. Brand has to work in so many more contexts. You have to understand how does the identity form itself, how does the brand act in a funny situation, how does it work in a serious one? You have to allow and understand how it works in these contexts in order for brand to be part of the conversation.

We can count on the large portion in B2B that want to be part of conversation that are not ready for that.

Conversation is still the same, it just moves faster from one medium to another.

The conversations are happening whether you’re participating in them or not. You can be afraid of them and hide from the information that’s out there, or be part of it.

What are the things that can be controlled?

What does the technology really change? Technology changes the circumstances in which the crisis happens. It changes who the influencers and important people are. But it also gives you more tools to refine and change your message.

The tech that allows you to target your message to a right group of people. If you talk to people about their experiences about social media:

Ads for women are very different. It’s increasingly the case that women get very different messages then men.

Search engine bias – there’s a big fight right now about the algorithm for search. They’re really important things from the influence point of view.

The media and analysts doesn’t matter that much anymore. The buying influence is coming from the peers. When it comes to lead conversation and getting involved with them – it’s not for sales team but for the whole team. If you’re not willing to expand your role and engage in the peer to peer conversation, you’re not giving your full potential to your company or a client.

The user interface matters. Like the recent Facebook redesign that made the user status much more prominent. You can do a lot with cue’s and prompts.

How do you develop your own influence (as an individual?) – personal brand

Let people see who you are and what are your interests and just go with it.

There’s something in seeing vulnerabilities in people and companies that makes you trust them a bit more.

Everyone and their dog should have an OpenID account now. Right? Well, mostly but I somehow managed to skip this revolution so while I probably have a bunch, I don’t have primary one. Since this is a pretty complex decision I decide to ask my nice Twitter followers. I get almost instantly the answer – “use myopenid.com“

That’s it. No Google queries and sifting through a number of blog posts reviewing different services. My own little crowd (?) already made a decision for me. Going with it sounds like a safe choice as I’ll have lot of support in the community and they’ve been referred by people I more or less trust with these technical decisions.

There are two important shifts that we can take from this:

For certain types of questions Google is really not appropriate anymore. It used to be suboptimal but now we don’t need it anymore. I don’t even need to spam all my IM contacts to get the answer. The same medium of Twitter applies also for Facebook streams. Depends where your “friends” are.

It’s a total upside down moment for brands when they can’t buy Google advertising anymore. It’s like the biggest nightmare that Seth Godin is talking about for a while. Passionate users and a good products coupled with a Word of Mouth effect. How do you as a company behave in such world?

I do realize that this is not strictly new as the same group effect was happening with BBS‘es, USENET and later Forums but I do think there’s something more liberating in the giant feed and ability to comment and cluster interests around it.

Next time (?) what happens when all these people learn to use FriendFeed?

I’ve been fascinated with Facebook relationship decisions for a while now. One of the more interesting challenges with this complex term is that it’s not fully transitional. You don’t just go single -> complicated -> dating -> engaged -> married and the same way back. Sometimes you also want to step out from the whole dating thing and say, I’m not even single (as it implies that you’re available for persuasion) but that you’re just not playing the game.

So how do you express this with the user interface? Simple, you make an empty box that anyone can assign meaning to it, but its mostly there to have the most private option and to dissolve any implications of labeling yourself.

Facebook remove relationship status drop-down

With drop-downs, it’s often the case that we want to undo our option but the form won’t allow us. It takes extra attention to detail to allow such option.